One of the challenges for the project was to create a homepage design that balanced the Board’s desire for a clean and elegant design with the need to have a website that was highly informative and represented the organizations’ multiple goals.

Goals for the website included information for homeowners looking for a contractor or other remodeling professional, information for members about upcoming event and information for prospective members who’d want to be impressed by the caliber and activities of current members. The Board also wanted space to recognize sponsors and carry ads. Viewing the website you can probably see how these goals are incorporated into the homepage design.

Here’s a table that shows how the organizations’ goals are carried out on the homepage:

Homeowner’s seeking a Contractor: Red “Find a Remodeler” Button in top right, banner in the middle with 2 projects and quotes from satisfied homeowners. Repeat of “Find a Remodeler” button below events.

Members’s Looking for Event Information: Event information front and center. Event button first on right on main navigation.

Prospective Members’s Looking for NARI Information: Image of Annual Golf Tournament with quote about efficacy of NARI networking, letter from the President to prospective members, join button on main navigation and join button for vendors as well.

Among the new elements on this feature rich site is the members directory or “Find A Remodeler” section. Here homeowners and members can search for NARI members by selecting a remodeling need like historical restoration, kitchen baths, or architects and see results for that category. They can also search by name, or type in a category or a city to search on. We’ve built several organizational directories. We’ve come to prefer this layout with the categories down the left side and the results on the right side.

Another goal for the group was to build traffic to the site and potentially generate traffic for their member websites. Each month they publish a email newsletter that goes out to members. In the future, they’ll be publishing the newsletter articles to the blog and seeding each post with relevant keywords. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that publishing content regularly to your blog can help grow traffic and reinforce the keywords on your website.

If your organization is looking for a better website in 2012, please give me a call. Full Orbit Web and Marketing works with organizations such as trades groups, non-profits, Chambers of commerce to build interactive and informative WordPress websites that attract new members and make it easy to connect and communicate.